Hurricane Melissa tore the roof from one of Jamaica’s best-known plantation houses and flattened a Georgian town. A year on, the island’s great houses face three tests at once: how to stand up to stronger storms, how to pay for it, and how to tell the truth about the people who built them.
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica — For more than two centuries, Greenwood Great House has looked down from its ridge on the border of St James and Trelawny toward the sea. It saw the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 sweep through the parish, then the end of slavery, the collapse of sugar and a long line of hurricanes. On 28 October 2025, Hurricane Melissa took its roof.
Within days, the Jamaica Observer reported that the house, about 225 years old and famous for the Barrett family’s library and antique musical instruments, had lost its roof and other key parts of its structure. Nearly a year later, a cruise-line excursion listing says Greenwood has reopened after repairs. The owners have not published an account of the work.
Greenwood’s ordeal is the clearest example of what Melissa did to a class of building that Jamaicans have long found hard to talk about. The great houses — the residences at the centre of the old sugar, coffee and cattle estates — are among the island’s most visited heritage sites, its most photographed wedding venues and its most uncomfortable monuments. They were built, staffed and paid for by the labour of enslaved Africans. Many survive as museums, hotels, restaurants, private homes or ruins.
Melissa has forced a question that heritage officials, owners and historians had been circling for years: what are these buildings for, and who should pay to keep them standing?
The strongest storm Jamaica has recorded
Melissa came ashore near New Hope, Westmoreland, at about 12:25 p.m. Jamaica time on 28 October 2025, with sustained winds the US National Hurricane Center estimates at 160 knots, about 185 miles per hour. In its final report, the center classes it as the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in Jamaica, tying the most powerful landfalls ever measured in the Atlantic basin. Government figures cited by the center put the death toll in Jamaica at 45.
The storm spared Kingston and hammered the west: Westmoreland, St Elizabeth, St James, Hanover and Trelawny — the old heartland of the sugar estates and the parishes where many surviving great houses stand. In November 2025, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank put physical damage at US$8.8 billion. In March 2026 the Planning Institute of Jamaica, working with the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, raised the full damage-and-loss figure to J$1.952 trillion, about US$12.2 billion, or 56.7 percent of the country’s 2024 output. The disaster management agency counted about 215,000 damaged buildings, 156,000 of them with roof damage.
Heritage was a small line in those figures, but a painful one. By mid-November 2025, the Jamaica National Heritage Trust had counted about 40 heritage structures destroyed or damaged, and warned that the total would rise once privately owned properties were assessed. The Gleaner, which reported the count, noted that the trust had not yet published a full list or a repair bill. A year later, no comprehensive list has been made public.
What the storm took
The worst losses fell on towns rather than estates. In Black River, the St Elizabeth capital where the storm made its closest pass, Waterloo House — built in 1819 and remembered as the first private home in Jamaica lit by electricity — was destroyed. St John’s Anglican Church, a limestone building from 1845, was reduced to little more than its bell tower. Writing in The Art Newspaper, the Jamaican cultural critic Annie Paul reported that practically no colonial buildings were left standing in the town.
Falmouth, the Trelawny port declared a National Monument in 1996 for what was then described as the Caribbean’s largest collection of Georgian architecture, lost the roofs of several of its civic landmarks: St Peter’s Anglican Church, built in 1769; the courthouse; the William Knibb Baptist Church and its old manse; and the Albert George Market. A former councillor warned that the town could lose its monument status. The heritage trust has made no such decision. By May 2026, insurers had assessed more than 16 municipal properties in the town, but repair work had not begun, and the Trelawny mayor was working from a shipping container.
Among the estate houses, the picture is patchier. At Hampden, the Trelawny rum estate, managers reported damage to about 80 percent of the estate’s roofs and crews re-roofing part of the great house. At Roxborough in Manchester, the birthplace of National Hero Norman Manley, the heritage trust is seeking public-private partners for a J$12.2 million renovation after the storm damaged the roof.
For many of the houses profiled in the Jamaica Homes News Great Houses archive, there is simply no public record either way. No damage reports have been published for Rose Hall, Cinnamon Hill, Good Hope, Bellefield, Green Park, Halse Hall or Bloomfield. The Tryall Club in Hanover, whose clubhouse is the Tryall Great House, reported damage to core facilities and some villas, and reopened in December 2025. Seville in St Ann, outside the worst of the storm, was open in August 2026, when Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, toured the heritage park. In Kingston, Devon House was largely spared.
Buildings that were made to be rebuilt
Jamaica’s great houses have always been storm architecture. Builders adapted British Georgian fashions to the island with thick cut-stone ground floors, lighter timber upper storeys, hipped roofs that shed wind better than gable ends, and jalousie shutters that let air through while keeping out sun and rain. Several houses have hurricane shelters or vaulted cellars. Tryall’s present house dates from 1834; earlier houses on the site were lost to hurricanes, and the estate works were destroyed during the 1831–32 rebellion. Seville lost its upper storey to a hurricane.
That history cuts both ways, conservationists say. The architect Patricia Green, who has written a series of Gleaner columns since the storm, argues that aerial footage of historic buildings left standing shows the resilience of the island’s traditional architecture, and that many timber buildings that failed had already been weakened by termites or were poorly anchored. Conservation specialists told the Observer that losses could have been reduced had maintenance and termite treatment not lapsed. The preservation architect Sarah Ann Hodges urged owners to salvage the old timbers rather than send them to the dump.
Ms Green has also challenged a habit of language. “Jamaica must stop calling the historical architecture ‘slave buildings’,” she wrote in April. She has urged that rebuilding use termite-resistant Jamaican hardwoods, and argues that the island’s vernacular architecture offers lessons for climate-resilient construction.
The economics of a heritage visit
Most great houses that are open to the public survive on tourism: cruise-ship excursions out of Falmouth and Montego Bay, tours from the north-coast hotels, and weddings. Melissa hit all three.
Tourism officially reopened on 15 December 2025, and the first cruise ship returned to Falmouth on 2 December. But in the year to the end of August 2026, the island received 2.34 million visitors, down 17 percent, and earned US$2.5 billion, down 18 percent, according to figures reported by Caribbean Journal. Seven all-inclusive resorts in the Rose Hall and Montego Bay area — the hotel strip that feeds visitors to Rose Hall and Cinnamon Hill — will not reopen until the first quarter of 2027. This week, Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett told the Observer he now expects 88 percent of the industry’s capacity back by December and a full recovery by around May 2027, a later date than the end-2026 target he set in March.
Ownership is a patchwork. The Rollins family, whose Rose Hall Developments restored Rose Hall from a roofless shell, also owns Cinnamon Hill, the Barrett family house that the musician Johnny Cash owned for three decades; Michele Rollins bought it back from his estate in 2012. Bellefield remains with the Kerr-Jarrett family, which runs it with partners as a restaurant and events venue. Chukka operates tours at Good Hope. Halse Hall, one of the oldest surviving houses, begun around 1680, sits on land worked by an alumina refinery. Seville belongs to the nation. Green Park, once home to more than 500 enslaved people, is a ruin. The current status of Harmony Hall and Bloomfield, both formerly open to the public, could not be confirmed.
Insurance offers limited comfort. Jamaica’s sovereign coverage paid out quickly — US$91.9 million from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility and the full US$150 million from a World Bank catastrophe bond — but that money went to the state, not to private property owners. By the end of September, private insurers had settled nearly 90 percent of the property and motor claims filed with them. No public figures exist on how many great houses were insured, or for how much.
The ledger beneath the floorboards
Whatever is rebuilt, the houses carry a history that no restoration can paper over. When Britain abolished slavery in 1834, about 311,000 people were enslaved in Jamaica, according to the historian B.W. Higman’s figures. Parliament set aside £20 million to compensate slave owners. The people who had been enslaved received nothing.
The estate records are precise. Using the slave registers and compensation files collected by University College London’s Legacies of British Slavery project, the Jamaica Homes News archive counts 2,250 people listed as enslaved on nine of these estates in the last registers before abolition. Owners and their creditors claimed £42,741 5s 11d from the British government for 2,156 people on the same estates. Green Park alone recorded 561 people in 1832; its owners claimed £10,172 17s 9d.
How the houses tell that history has drawn criticism. In Unsilencing Slavery, a 2022 study of Rose Hall, the Barnard College historian Celia E. Naylor described a tour built around the ghost story of Annie Palmer, the “White Witch” — a legend largely invented in a 1929 novel by H.G. de Lisser — while the enslaved people of the estate went unmentioned. Working from the registers of 1817 to 1832, she reconstructed some of their lives. “We need to move away from these anesthetized versions of history,” she told an interviewer in 2023.
Not everyone mourns the buildings. In her Art Newspaper essay, Ms Paul quoted the Rastafarian historian Robin “Bongo Jerry” Small, who sees colonial structures as symbols of extractive empire and regards grief over their loss as misplaced. Ms Paul wondered whether Melissa had been a “decolonial” wind, while noting that the view is contested.
That argument now has a legal stage. On 7 September 2026, Jamaica petitioned King Charles III over the legality of slavery and Britain’s obligation to provide a remedy. Two weeks later, the culture minister, Olivia Grange, told Parliament that the King had referred the petition to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. “We look forward to the opportunity to argue our case,” she said. In March, the UN General Assembly adopted a Ghana-led resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity, by 123 votes to 3 with 52 abstentions. Reparations are expected to feature at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Antigua from 1 to 4 November, although British ministers have said they do not see reparations as the answer.
What comes next
The legal tools for protecting the houses are still being sharpened. The cabinet approved amendments to the Jamaica National Heritage Trust Act years ago, after they were promised in the 2019 Throne Speech; this year they were still at the drafting stage. In April, Jamaica signed its ratification of the 1970 UNESCO convention against trafficking in cultural property. In May, the Senate passed the law creating the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority, which will steer the rebuilding. Ms Green argues that one section of the act covers sites of architectural and historic interest, but how far it will protect privately owned great houses is untested.
International money for heritage has been modest and slow. UNESCO approved US$61,000 in emergency assistance in July 2026, signed at the end of September — for the Blue and John Crow Mountains World Heritage Site, not for any building. Seville has sat on UNESCO’s tentative list for World Heritage status since 2009; Port Royal was inscribed in July 2025. Falmouth is not on the list. The Port Authority has drawn up a restoration and resilience plan for the town, but no approval or funding has been announced. There is no dedicated fund for great houses.
In Black River, the government has chosen transformation over reconstruction. Prime Minister Andrew Holness has said the town will not be rebuilt as it was. “We will rebuild it as it should be,” he said, as plans moved its civic centre inland, above the reach of storm surge.
The great houses do not have that option. They stand where they were put — on hilltops chosen for the breeze, the view and the command of the cane fields below. Their owners will have to decide whether to restore them as they were, adapt them for a hotter, stormier century, or let some of them go. Whatever they decide, the registers in London and Spanish Town will still record the names, ages and numbers of the people who made them. A year after Melissa, that may be the part of the heritage most worth protecting.
Explore the Jamaica Great Houses archive
Our interactive Great Houses archive has a full history, timeline, slave-register records, compensation claims and a quiz for each of thirteen houses: Bellefield, Bloomfield, Cherry Garden, Cinnamon Hill, Devon House, Good Hope, Green Park, Greenwood, Halse Hall, Harmony Hall, Rose Hall, Seville and Tryall.
Sources
- US National Hurricane Center, Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Melissa (AL132025), February 2026, revised May 2026.
- World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, damage estimate for Hurricane Melissa, 19 November 2025.
- Jamaica Information Service, “Total Loss and Damage from Hurricane Melissa Estimated at $1.952 Trillion,” 6 March 2026; “Hurricane Melissa Damaged 215,000 Buildings,” 4 December 2025.
- Jamaica Observer, “Greenwood Great House severely damaged by Hurricane Melissa,” 2 November 2025; “Hampden hangs tough,” 15 November 2025; “Rebuilding history,” 21 December 2025; Roxborough renovation report, 6 July 2026; “Relief in sight,” 12 May 2026; tourism recovery report, 13 October 2026.
- Jamaica Gleaner, “The past in ruins,” 14 November 2025; Falmouth National Monument report, 20 November 2025; “A requiem for historic buildings in Black River,” 8 November 2025; Black River recovery report, 28 April 2026; Patricia Green columns, December 2025 to June 2026; reparations petition report, 22 September 2026; UNESCO convention report, 2 April 2026.
- Annie Paul, “A decolonial wind?”, The Art Newspaper, 25 November 2025.
- Caribbean Journal, Jamaica tourism figures, 4 September 2026; Tryall Club reports, November and December 2025.
- Gleaner and Artemis reports on CCRIF and catastrophe bond payouts, November 2025; Insurance Association of Jamaica figures as reported by the Observer, October 2026.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, International Assistance 3652 (Blue and John Crow Mountains), 2026.
- Celia E. Naylor, Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica (University of Georgia Press, 2022), and interview with the Barnard Center for Research on Women, June 2023.
- UCL Legacies of British Slavery database (slave registers and compensation claims); B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean.
- Jamaica Homes News, Jamaica Great Houses archive.
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